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Aging in America
the social sciences biological change as primary, with
culture as a thin
veneer. But in one short century we have added 30
years to life expectancy. Evolution pales next to this advance. It has
been engineered through science, through collectively shared
understanding of the spread of disease and collective efforts to improve
sanitation, limit the number of offspring and prevent disease in our
children. It is not that we are living longer and longer once we are
adults. Rather, the vast bulk of this change is due to a dramatic
reduction in infant mortality. In 1900, half of all newborn infants died
before the age of 5. Today the vast majority of infants born in this
country will live out their maximal life spans.
MYTH #1:
The fountain of youth
 uman
beings are distinguished from
other animals in that they anticipate their own death. Throughout
recorded history we have searched for that fountain of youth. The search
continues today under the label of "life extension." A huge number of
people are taking megadoses of vitamins, striving for very low body
weight and consuming the services of cosmetic and surgical industries
aimed at staving off the aging process. Many more of us share the
feeling, just under the surface, that if you work at it hard enough, you
can avoid old age, you can stay young. Let me quote Woody Allen: "To
Americans, death is an option."
In recent years, as marketers have begun to recognize the demographic
changes, they have begun to portray images of old age in which older
people are vital and active. Long-held images that showed frail elderly
are changing overnight and suggesting that youth can be preserved
indefinitely.
There are many positive consequences of this portrayal. There is just
one problem: If successful aging is defined as maintaining youth and
living long, we all fail. There is no good evidence that life can be
extended beyond a fixed limit that we are now approaching. Experimental
studies in which selective inbreeding has been used to develop
particularly long-lived strains of animals have failed, usually
producing instead strains with shorter life expectancies
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